Circular firing squad

Tuesday

Oct 8, 2013 at 12:01 AM

You have to wonder if Rhode Island Republicans won’t be satisfied until the entire party can meet in a phone booth.Given the transparent failure of Rhode Island’s mostly Democratic leadership on the economic...

You have to wonder if Rhode Island Republicans won’t be satisfied until the entire party can meet in a phone booth.

Given the transparent failure of Rhode Island’s mostly Democratic leadership on the economic front, they could be drawing the public’s attention to the state’s woes and making a serious case for policies that might re-energize job creation.

Instead, they choose to do this: Raffle off a deadly assault-style weapon, at an event billed as a day “full of fun” for the family. It’s an idea in such breathtakingly bad taste that it could have come from the satirical publication “The Onion.” Yet a gun raffle was exactly the fund-raising gambit recently selected by state Republican officials.

At a time when deadly massacres have almost become commonplace, a political party’s treatment of a lethal firearm as a prize is freakishly insensitive. The weapon raffled Sunday was Smith & Wesson’s version of a rifle that was used in the Newtown, Conn., school slayings. What sort of message does this send?

A number of Republican officeholders — including Cranston Mayor Allan Fung, touted for governor, and State Sen. Dawson Hodgson — rushed to distance themselves from the event. So the stupidity was not universal.

While the battle over the Second Amendment does generate lucrative contributions for both parties, Rhode Island Republicans hurt themselves with the center by going so blatantly on the offensive over this issue. The raffle can only make it harder for the party to do better in a state that could desperately use two-party competition. State GOP Chairman Mark Smiley and finance committee chairman Stephen C. Tetzner ought to have thought twice on this one.